Friday, May 29, 2009

Sources: Bear, woods, Charmin

Minorities on the court have been rare in its 220-year history. All but two of the 110 justices have been men, and only two of them have not been white, according to CNN's political unit.

... raising the (quite reasonable) question of whether much attention ought to be paid to the output of a CNN reporter who has to source this information to "CNN's political unit." Well, not much defense here; the reporter might be a little out of position (brought in from the toy department to handle the write-hed-before-reporting reaction piece?*), but you'd still have to be pretty inattentive not to have already internalized those data.

Which sort of brings us to the point. There are readers out there who still seem to be looking to old-fashioned media for information. In return, they expect us to pay attention. Seems like a reasonable deal to me.